Any basic, factual information can have a slight twist to its presentation. Something as simple as positioning two unrelated statistics next to each other without ever specifically linking them can tint someone's view. Or, if it's graphed, and you want to hide or exaggerate the increase in something like a crime rate, then you increase or decrease the increment on either axis. Sure, when you read it, you know what you're actually looking at, but a steep curve means more to your subconscious than any numbers ever could. I'm not attacking any specific government or agency in this. Just pointing out that facts are rarely just facts.
Some people send chain mail, others don't. Others still, don't want their friends to know they're chain mail sending idiots, thus explaining the "meandering routes".
How is that unfair? He holds the Paralympic world record for the 400m, and he STILL has to improve on that by 1.01 seconds to meet qualification standard. I'm by no means an athlete, but I know that professional sprinters and swimmers find it so hard to improve on their own personal bests. Each second is a hardly won battle in it's self. I think he has a hard challenge ahead of him to be selected, and will still probably on place in an average middle position at the Olympics.
Everyone loves the overpowered monstrous Gundams, but there's something in me that likes the simpler Zakus. I also like the RK-92 Savage from Full Metal Panic. There's just something about clunky, mass-produced military technology.
Or in this case, Paris. The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws. They do it in China, with their censored Google, so I can't imagine them putting up too much of a fight against French privacy laws.
Since I'm already a part of this discussion, I can't moderate you up. I'll have to settle for agreeing with you. While they're at it, why not make a hard, definite rule about when people are tried as juveniles or adults? I've heard of some pretty young people tried as adults, and older tried as juveniles.
I was going to mention age of consent, but I thought it would seem like too much of a pointless rant if I went off on that tangent. In Australia, some states say 16, some say 17, and Victoria actually has a special provision, where the age of consent is 16, but if either or both people are under the age of consent, then there can't be more than two years' age difference. Strange, but at least it stops people from becoming sex offenders if they're 16 with a 15 year old girlfriend or boyfriend.
I've always thought the broad-sweeping American-influenced use of age 18 on the internet is amazingly arrogant and blind. 18 is the arbitrary age of majority in some western cultures. In other western cultures, it's 21. In Japan (and perhaps other Asian countries, though I don't know), it's 20. Age of majority is probably even lower in some countries, and even higher in others.
I've seen a lot of crazy and ridiculous rulings by courts, since I started reading slashdot a few years back. If there's one thing I've learned it's to never underestimate the stupidity and/or blindness (in the metaphorical sense, not the literal) of any one person, or group of people. You always end up surprised, and seldom pleasantly.
That's the law, but it's not how it will be upheld. I always get modded down for saying this, but "Since when has the law meant anything in court?". The MPAA and RIAA will just keep driving at this "precedent" they seem to have won, regardless of whether it's a real precedent or not.
Why replace what they upgrade? A bullet is no less deadly for the year the gun was made. Perhaps less accurate, or a shorter range, but a fast moving piece of metal kills someone regardless of the rifle.
I never even thought about that. I guess I've been a little blinkered by the anti-America bandwagon. I've been too concerned about what America is going to pull Australia into next to take notice of much of the rest of the world. I have often contemplated how alliances would form in Asia, and the rest of the world though, since Asian foreign policy usually has at least as much effect on Australia as American foreign policy. I've always figured North Korea would be on China's side, not just because they're both militaristic dictatorships (however they choose to name themselves), but more because no matter how big your army is, you don't want to alienate too many people at once. Hitler did it when he attacked Russia while he was still busy in France. I think that contributed to losing the war for him, but I digress. If North Korea entered a conflict, South Korea would most likely immediately stand in opposition. Japan may spend a while being indecisive, but I think it's probable they would join with South Korea - either directly defying the restrictions on their military, or demanding they be lifted before taking action. I say this because America would move against China, and Japan wouldn't want to be the meat in the sandwich again. Australia would obviously be pulled into this as well, though I can at least understand why, this time, since it's in my region of the world (vaguely). Indonesia, who we have had very strained relations with over the years, would probably try and take advantage of the situation and attack us, with our defense slightly weakened from our involvement elsewhere. As you said, Russia would be against China, but I think it may result in a Russian civil war. There could be a lot of people in Russia who miss the old days of the Soviet Union, and would side with a communist superpower; this, however, is just pure speculation on my part, and is just as likely to be completely wrong. The chances of a nuclear strike in this scenario are very high. The Doomsday Clock is at 5 minutes to midnight now. I wonder how quickly that will change.
I have the feeling the expansion of this system has an ulterior motive. I'm sure they're right, from their point of view, about the other GPS networks. I don't doubt them. I do doubt their good intentions though. A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is. It might even end up mandatory. I know I probably sound a little extreme, and for all I know, I could be wrong. I'm just not very trusting of any government. The UK is becoming an Orwellian surveillance state, America is getting "Real ID" or something. I don't know much about it. Here in Australia, various government factions keep pushing for a national ID card, disguising it under various names to try and fool the sheep, or "voters", as we prefer to be known. I just wouldn't put it past a country that is known to heavily censor the internet and spy on citizens' internet use, to basically microchip everyone to know exactly where they are. Why stake out the house of a dissident, when they can track his movements and arrest everyone involved with them, without lifting a finger and exposing their domestic spies?
I wonder; if Steve Irwin had a choice, would he have picked the platypus barb, or the sting ray barb? Sure, he'd be alive today if he got stung by the platypus, but it would have really hurt like hell. I'm going to be modded down by all the Crocodile Hunter fans now...
Everyone knows a little thing like the law means absolutely nothing in court. If laws were any use, we wouldn't need courts to decide who's right, would we?
I only used it because it was used in the article. Little things like making sense just seem to matter to me, so I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel by using my own word for something already named in the story. It may have a particular name already ('server' on it's own seems good enough), but since I'm talking about this story, I'll talk within it's terminology. Hence the quotation marks on "crime server", when I used it.
If I were to steal a credit card number, I'd want to be the only person with access to it, so I could max it out. Otherwise it's the same as robbing a bank and storing all of the cash safely in the town square.
My first thought was, surely someone who accumulates this kind of data would go to some lengths to secure it. That leads me to believe that this "crime server" is owned by an amateur. The computer crime equivalent of a petty thief. Imagine how many properly run and hidden crime servers must exist. And think how many more petty thieves must own similar ones.
I've always seen Ballmer as the idiot patsy. The one to blow a lot of hot air and take the fall when everything goes wrong. He rarely seems to know what he's talking about, and is always talking before he thinks (either that, or he has an extremely defective thought process...). I don't know if he knows anything about programming, but I at least want to see a decent software engineer in charge of Microsoft. They did just fine at their usual "crush the opposition" game when Bill was in charge. There are a hell of a lot of mistakes in Ballmer's era. Whether or not he's responsible for them, he will be held responsible.
Depending on where you are, you could wait more than a week after the official release before a movie gets to your local cinema. It may not seem like much of a problem in other, more densely populated countries, but Australia has a lot of sprawling rural areas, more than a day's drive from the nearest real city. Even here, in Mackay, we get movies a few days late, at least. Or not at all, unless it's a big budget instant blockbuster like Iron Man. Mackay isn't even a rural area, either. A population of a few hundred thousand (if I remember correctly). If the movie studios distributed their movies digitally, there would be a lot less of a wait for people not in capitol cities.
In my experience, the only people who need Blu Ray or HD DVD at home are people who want it for bragging rights. A friend of mine (rich bastard) has a huge HD TV, with a resolution of 1080p. Standard definition DVDs look fine on that. I think the only real use for them is in cinema. However, although I don't know what they do in other countries, Australian cinemas still stubbornly use traditional film, since every manager of any department other than IT is a Luddite. Why should I have to wait for a courier to bring a canister of film here? Surely cinemas could download a movie in a high resolution from a franchise server. Or even from the movie studio, if they ever get over their fear of digital distribution. Then the cinemas would be able to do more screenings of popular movies, and take almost no financial risk (beyond the risk of screening a different movie) when they want to screen a low budget independent film. Sorry - I went WAY off topic there. Anyway, to remind people who lost interest half way through that post, my point was nobody really needs high definition movies... Unless they've got very good eyesight.
I bought a 360 because, at the time, it was about $200 cheaper (Australian dollars. So just short of equal value to USD, but double the price). Right within my budget, if I had the audacity to want to afford games. Now, if I want to watch Blu-ray, I'm apparently told I have to buy ANOTHER 360. What a surprise. Shafted by Microsoft. Who'd have thought? Sorry. No sale. If I could afford another 360, I'd save for just a little longer and get a PS3.
First: Pirates and ninjas, the bitterest rivals on the internet. Have everyone come as either a pirate or a ninja, but don't bother evening the sides or anything, just let them choose. Second: Red Dwarf. Drink every time you hear the words "smeg", "git", or "gimboid". Plus any others you can think of. Third: Although it's not math-related, Take turns reading paragraphs of The Eye of Argon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Argon. The one reading must not laugh.
Linux will never get like that though (-1 flamebait, -1 troll, -1 offtopic). Unless the worst viruses in the world are interested in your music collection, stored in your home folder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Any basic, factual information can have a slight twist to its presentation. Something as simple as positioning two unrelated statistics next to each other without ever specifically linking them can tint someone's view. Or, if it's graphed, and you want to hide or exaggerate the increase in something like a crime rate, then you increase or decrease the increment on either axis. Sure, when you read it, you know what you're actually looking at, but a steep curve means more to your subconscious than any numbers ever could. I'm not attacking any specific government or agency in this. Just pointing out that facts are rarely just facts.
Some people send chain mail, others don't. Others still, don't want their friends to know they're chain mail sending idiots, thus explaining the "meandering routes".
How is that unfair? He holds the Paralympic world record for the 400m, and he STILL has to improve on that by 1.01 seconds to meet qualification standard. I'm by no means an athlete, but I know that professional sprinters and swimmers find it so hard to improve on their own personal bests. Each second is a hardly won battle in it's self. I think he has a hard challenge ahead of him to be selected, and will still probably on place in an average middle position at the Olympics.
Everyone loves the overpowered monstrous Gundams, but there's something in me that likes the simpler Zakus. I also like the RK-92 Savage from Full Metal Panic. There's just something about clunky, mass-produced military technology.
Or in this case, Paris. The law is the law, and Google need to respect the local laws. They do it in China, with their censored Google, so I can't imagine them putting up too much of a fight against French privacy laws.
Since I'm already a part of this discussion, I can't moderate you up. I'll have to settle for agreeing with you. While they're at it, why not make a hard, definite rule about when people are tried as juveniles or adults? I've heard of some pretty young people tried as adults, and older tried as juveniles.
I was going to mention age of consent, but I thought it would seem like too much of a pointless rant if I went off on that tangent. In Australia, some states say 16, some say 17, and Victoria actually has a special provision, where the age of consent is 16, but if either or both people are under the age of consent, then there can't be more than two years' age difference. Strange, but at least it stops people from becoming sex offenders if they're 16 with a 15 year old girlfriend or boyfriend.
I've always thought the broad-sweeping American-influenced use of age 18 on the internet is amazingly arrogant and blind. 18 is the arbitrary age of majority in some western cultures. In other western cultures, it's 21. In Japan (and perhaps other Asian countries, though I don't know), it's 20. Age of majority is probably even lower in some countries, and even higher in others.
I've seen a lot of crazy and ridiculous rulings by courts, since I started reading slashdot a few years back. If there's one thing I've learned it's to never underestimate the stupidity and/or blindness (in the metaphorical sense, not the literal) of any one person, or group of people. You always end up surprised, and seldom pleasantly.
That's the law, but it's not how it will be upheld. I always get modded down for saying this, but "Since when has the law meant anything in court?". The MPAA and RIAA will just keep driving at this "precedent" they seem to have won, regardless of whether it's a real precedent or not.
Why replace what they upgrade? A bullet is no less deadly for the year the gun was made. Perhaps less accurate, or a shorter range, but a fast moving piece of metal kills someone regardless of the rifle.
I never even thought about that. I guess I've been a little blinkered by the anti-America bandwagon. I've been too concerned about what America is going to pull Australia into next to take notice of much of the rest of the world. I have often contemplated how alliances would form in Asia, and the rest of the world though, since Asian foreign policy usually has at least as much effect on Australia as American foreign policy. I've always figured North Korea would be on China's side, not just because they're both militaristic dictatorships (however they choose to name themselves), but more because no matter how big your army is, you don't want to alienate too many people at once. Hitler did it when he attacked Russia while he was still busy in France. I think that contributed to losing the war for him, but I digress. If North Korea entered a conflict, South Korea would most likely immediately stand in opposition. Japan may spend a while being indecisive, but I think it's probable they would join with South Korea - either directly defying the restrictions on their military, or demanding they be lifted before taking action. I say this because America would move against China, and Japan wouldn't want to be the meat in the sandwich again. Australia would obviously be pulled into this as well, though I can at least understand why, this time, since it's in my region of the world (vaguely). Indonesia, who we have had very strained relations with over the years, would probably try and take advantage of the situation and attack us, with our defense slightly weakened from our involvement elsewhere. As you said, Russia would be against China, but I think it may result in a Russian civil war. There could be a lot of people in Russia who miss the old days of the Soviet Union, and would side with a communist superpower; this, however, is just pure speculation on my part, and is just as likely to be completely wrong. The chances of a nuclear strike in this scenario are very high. The Doomsday Clock is at 5 minutes to midnight now. I wonder how quickly that will change.
I have the feeling the expansion of this system has an ulterior motive. I'm sure they're right, from their point of view, about the other GPS networks. I don't doubt them. I do doubt their good intentions though. A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is. It might even end up mandatory. I know I probably sound a little extreme, and for all I know, I could be wrong. I'm just not very trusting of any government. The UK is becoming an Orwellian surveillance state, America is getting "Real ID" or something. I don't know much about it. Here in Australia, various government factions keep pushing for a national ID card, disguising it under various names to try and fool the sheep, or "voters", as we prefer to be known. I just wouldn't put it past a country that is known to heavily censor the internet and spy on citizens' internet use, to basically microchip everyone to know exactly where they are. Why stake out the house of a dissident, when they can track his movements and arrest everyone involved with them, without lifting a finger and exposing their domestic spies?
I wonder; if Steve Irwin had a choice, would he have picked the platypus barb, or the sting ray barb? Sure, he'd be alive today if he got stung by the platypus, but it would have really hurt like hell. I'm going to be modded down by all the Crocodile Hunter fans now...
Everyone knows a little thing like the law means absolutely nothing in court. If laws were any use, we wouldn't need courts to decide who's right, would we?
I only used it because it was used in the article. Little things like making sense just seem to matter to me, so I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel by using my own word for something already named in the story. It may have a particular name already ('server' on it's own seems good enough), but since I'm talking about this story, I'll talk within it's terminology. Hence the quotation marks on "crime server", when I used it.
If I were to steal a credit card number, I'd want to be the only person with access to it, so I could max it out. Otherwise it's the same as robbing a bank and storing all of the cash safely in the town square.
My first thought was, surely someone who accumulates this kind of data would go to some lengths to secure it. That leads me to believe that this "crime server" is owned by an amateur. The computer crime equivalent of a petty thief. Imagine how many properly run and hidden crime servers must exist. And think how many more petty thieves must own similar ones.
I've always seen Ballmer as the idiot patsy. The one to blow a lot of hot air and take the fall when everything goes wrong. He rarely seems to know what he's talking about, and is always talking before he thinks (either that, or he has an extremely defective thought process...). I don't know if he knows anything about programming, but I at least want to see a decent software engineer in charge of Microsoft. They did just fine at their usual "crush the opposition" game when Bill was in charge. There are a hell of a lot of mistakes in Ballmer's era. Whether or not he's responsible for them, he will be held responsible.
Depending on where you are, you could wait more than a week after the official release before a movie gets to your local cinema. It may not seem like much of a problem in other, more densely populated countries, but Australia has a lot of sprawling rural areas, more than a day's drive from the nearest real city. Even here, in Mackay, we get movies a few days late, at least. Or not at all, unless it's a big budget instant blockbuster like Iron Man. Mackay isn't even a rural area, either. A population of a few hundred thousand (if I remember correctly). If the movie studios distributed their movies digitally, there would be a lot less of a wait for people not in capitol cities.
In my experience, the only people who need Blu Ray or HD DVD at home are people who want it for bragging rights. A friend of mine (rich bastard) has a huge HD TV, with a resolution of 1080p. Standard definition DVDs look fine on that. I think the only real use for them is in cinema. However, although I don't know what they do in other countries, Australian cinemas still stubbornly use traditional film, since every manager of any department other than IT is a Luddite. Why should I have to wait for a courier to bring a canister of film here? Surely cinemas could download a movie in a high resolution from a franchise server. Or even from the movie studio, if they ever get over their fear of digital distribution. Then the cinemas would be able to do more screenings of popular movies, and take almost no financial risk (beyond the risk of screening a different movie) when they want to screen a low budget independent film. Sorry - I went WAY off topic there. Anyway, to remind people who lost interest half way through that post, my point was nobody really needs high definition movies... Unless they've got very good eyesight.
I bought a 360 because, at the time, it was about $200 cheaper (Australian dollars. So just short of equal value to USD, but double the price). Right within my budget, if I had the audacity to want to afford games. Now, if I want to watch Blu-ray, I'm apparently told I have to buy ANOTHER 360. What a surprise. Shafted by Microsoft. Who'd have thought? Sorry. No sale. If I could afford another 360, I'd save for just a little longer and get a PS3.
I suppose you never do really know about security holes until either the developer or a security expert publishes them. Until then, any program could be being used to plant malicious code on any system. I guess I've just been a little blasé about open source software, since any deliberately malicious program would quickly draw attention. Although, that says nothing of security holes in open source software. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
First: Pirates and ninjas, the bitterest rivals on the internet. Have everyone come as either a pirate or a ninja, but don't bother evening the sides or anything, just let them choose. Second: Red Dwarf. Drink every time you hear the words "smeg", "git", or "gimboid". Plus any others you can think of. Third: Although it's not math-related, Take turns reading paragraphs of The Eye of Argon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_of_Argon. The one reading must not laugh.
Linux will never get like that though (-1 flamebait, -1 troll, -1 offtopic). Unless the worst viruses in the world are interested in your music collection, stored in your home folder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system.